Columbia University professor and particle physicist Michael Tuts will discuss the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. He will illustrate how data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC might help us to understand how we came to exist by explaining the origin of mass, the nature of space and time, and the composition of the universe, along with other fascinating puzzles.
Columbia physicist explains what our $40 million a year may yield from world's "largest scientific instrument"
Diagrams Standard Model, demos weakness of gravity, plays rap video
Why safety is not an issue: black holes and strangelets will go pfft instantlyMonday Feb 7: Michael Tuts is a Columbia physicist with an important role at CERN's LHC - he is the titular head of a pack of 400 scientists who are helping to spend $40 million a year in US tax dollars running the world's greatest "scientific instrument", as he calls it.
When the Guggenheim Work and Process series invited him to explain all to their audience, this weekend's double header resulted. On Sunday he "explained" the Standard Model and tonight he "explained" to another packed house what the LHC might contribute to filling in the gaps in the model, primarily the possibility of additional dimensions and bringing gravity into the fold to pair it with quantum physics for the ultimate theory of everything.
"Explaining" is in quotes because actually, despite a bunch of colorful slides and diagrams Tuts confirmed our suspicion that it is essentially impossible to explain any of the superficially concrete ideas of modern physics other than presenting childish analogies which give the untutored the feeling of understanding without actually adding to their comprehension one whit, since all these theoretical ideas such as additional dimensions are simply a matter of dressing up mathematical concepts in everyday analogies which don't really explain anything at all.
Thus the agreeable Tuts explained the weakness of gravity with a perfectly reasonable demonstration that a small magnet could hold onto his pen against the gravitational pull of the entire Earth, which was fair enough. But when it came to explaining the additional dimensions involved in string theory he was reduced to showing that a piece of paper was two dimensional - any spot on it could be found with just two coordinates - and if rolled up tightly would amount to one dimension - where one coordinate was enough to find any spot on it - and thus one could jump from one to two. But how one could translate this into comprehending the jump from three spatial dimensions to four or more remained opaque as usual to this reporter, and evidently to a lot of smart people in the audience as well. As one woman asked me afterwards, "did you understand what he said?"
But then any profound explanation of how things work at the most fundamental level was not necessarily the point of the exercise, which involved a lot of colorful charts, diagrams, and photos of the wondrously large LHC, 17 miles in circumference and with ATLAS detectors almost twice the size of the Guggenheim itself. This was an audience in a series devoted to the creative process, after all, and there was not only much to look at but even one of Kate MacAlpine's rap videos to play in giving the audience a visual idea of one of mankind's latest grand achievements, even if its inner workings might remain a bit mysterious behind all the fireworks and huge machinery.
Needless to say, this informed observer couldn't help asking this prominent CERN physicist whether there might not be some tiny risk involved in cranking up the LHC to ever increasing energy and luminosity in the search for another dimension or two, given that strangelets were denied as a possibility by CERN PR but nonetheless a two ton detector had been installed by CMS to look for them. This was the last question granted, and Professor Tuts dispatched it with ease. There was the same concern at Brookhaven with RIC, he said, where they had been smashing gold nuclei ions and they had never seen a strangelet.
Anyway, he added for good measure, cosmic rays had been bombarding Earth for 4 billion years and it had come to no harm, and the events at the LHC were therefore safe. "People have looked at this issue, " he said, referring to the CERN safety reports. The meeting broke up for a half hour of wine and neatly cut white bread sandwich squares upstairs, and we eventually had the chance to suggest to him that perhaps both these reassurances were a little out of date.
Unfazed at this small objection the amiable Columbia boffin returned that indeed strangelets might appear after all but he said they would vanish as rapidly as they were manufactured, just as the black holes would do, if they appeared. As for Cosmic Ray 1, as that safety argument has been labeled by the renowned string theorist Brian Greene, it was he agreed abandoned by knowledgeable physicists as long ago as 2004, when Martin Rees wrote his best selling Doomsday book.
He then moved to the new refuge of neutron stars and white dwarfs which are now presented as the latest evidence that cosmic ray bombardment can be survived even if the rays and their collision debris are slowed enough to hang around instead of escaping the Earth, so the threat of black holes lingering instead of vanishing immediately is not considered threatening.
So how about the fact that both types of heavenly bodies are now considered at least partly made up of strange matter? Yes, he agreed, and laughed. So did this mean that the truth about the LHC is that it may well contain dangers but none so definite and predictable that anyone could seriously consider stopping the project for outside review? It seemed so.
Especially after talking to a tall, brunette and slightly odd young woman who had sat beside me in the front row. Medea had studied nuclear physics as an undergraduate and had ended up in neuroscience, she said, and she was highly concerned at what she reported as Obama's clamp down on cloning, which she felt was as disruptive to scientific research as Clinton's stand on the same issue.
Scientific exploration cannot operate successfully under the oversight of a bureaucracy, she fumed. One imagined that Professor Michael Tuts would have been delighted to meet her. But since we didn't see her appear at the party, we never got a chance to introduce her.